There’s More Than One Way To Hunt For Gravitational Waves, Part 2

This is Part 2 of a two-part feature on the search for gravitational waves. Read Part 1 here.

All of these techniques are exquisitely sensitive, seeking out minute changes. But gravitational waves might have a much stronger impact on matter than previously assumed, thanks to resonant frequencies. It’s something Alexander Graham Bell noticed as a young man: strike a chord on one piano and it will be echoed by a piano in another room. The effect is known as “sympathetic resonance.” Objects like a piano’s strings vibrate at very specific frequencies. If there is another object nearby that is sensitive to the same frequency, it will absorb the vibrations (sound waves) emanated from the other object and start to vibrate in response.

Strike a chord on one piano and it will be echoed by a piano in another room. Physicists have proposed using a similar resonance phenomenon to detect gravitational waves. Credit: Flickr user Half Full Photography, adapted under a Creative Commons license.

That’s the essence of a new paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, proposing that certain stars could absorb energy from gravitational waves that ripple by. Should that happen, the stars would show a temporary marked increase in brightness from that excess energy that could be measurable.

Co-author Saavik Ford of CUNY’s Graduate Center compared stars to the bars on a xylophone, each of which has a natural resonant frequency, just like piano strings. Striking those bars in sequence, moving from lower to higher frequencies, is akin to how two merging black holes produce gravitational waves of gradually increasing frequency. “If you have two black holes merging with each other and emitting gravitational waves at a certain frequency, you’re only going to hit one of the bars on the xylophone at a time,” Ford explained. “But because the black holes decay as they come closer together, the frequency of the gravitational waves changes and you’ll hit a sequence of notes. So you’ll likely see the big stars lighting up first followed by smaller and smaller ones.”

Perhaps the Earth itself could be used as a gravitational wave detector: it, too, could vibrate like a bell in response to gravitational waves rippling through. Set up a global array of highly sensitive seismometers, and one could conceivably find evidence of such waves in the data That was the gist of a 1969 paper by physicist Freeman Dyson.

Dyson’s work was the inspiration for Harvard graduate student Michael Coughlin and a colleague, Jan Harms of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Florence, Italy, who were working with seismic data relating to LIGO with an eye toward reducing the noisy background so that a signal would be more easily detected. Coughlin recalled Dyson’s paper and thought such an approach could be useful for setting some vital constraints on background noise, and he and Harms did an initial analysis of terrestrial seismic data.

Then another professor recalled his earlier geophysical work with instruments placed on the moon during the Apollo missions to track so-called “moonquakes.” Those instruments collected lunar seismic data from July 1975 to March 1977. Intrigued, Coughlin and Harms analyzed that older dataset as well, correlating it with their earlier terrestrial analysis. They published their findings in Physical Review Letters earlier this year.

Coughlin and Harms didn’t find any evidence of gravitational waves in their analysis, nor did they expect to. One reason is that there is a lot of seismic noise from other sources cluttering up the data. The moon might not have Earth’s plate tectonics, atmospheric fluctuations, or volcanic activity, but asteroids routinely hit the moon, causing it to “ring” for weeks from the impact. There is also background noise generated by thermal heating from the Sun and tidal forces.

Cornish pronounced their work a good analysis but said it is unlikely to lead to direct detection of gravitational waves, even if NASA placed upgraded seismometers on the moon with far greater sensitivity to get a better dataset. He suggested that the best way to search for gravitational waves in that frequency range is the space-based LISA, now known as the Next Gravitational-wave Observatory (NGO), another very large and pricey collaboration similar to LIGO (in that it uses a similar laser interferometer array) that is still several years’ away from completion. Meanwhile, LIGO is currently undergoing upgrades, including an additional mirror to increase its sensitivity to other frequencies of gravitational waves, like those produced by binary pulsars.

Still, there remains much uncertainty in the various proposed models for gravitational waves. Coughlin’s and Harms’ null result has helped further constrain the range in which we should expect to see gravitational waves in Earth’s vicinity. “If we thought we knew what the source distribution of gravitational waves looked like in the universe, then it wouldn’t be quite such a useful exercise,” Coughlin said. “Since we don’t, and the cost is relatively low, I don’t see why we shouldn’t try it.”

Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer Ouellette is the author of four popular science books, most recently Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self (2014). She maintains a blog called Cocktail Party Physics at Scientific American, featuring her avatar altar-ego/evil twin, Jen-Luc Piquant – also her Twitter handle. Ouellette is a co-host for Virtually Speaking Science, a weekly conversation with a prominent scientist or science writer hosted by the Exploratorium in Second Life and aired as a podcast by Blog Talk Radio. She holds a black belt in jujitsu, and lives in Los Angeles, California, with her husband, Caltech physicist Sean (M.) Carroll.

The problem is that light is not a particle or an object. What they should measure is the difference of energy levels of of laser beams that are coming from sources that are putting out the same power, but in different gravity. why? Because I am interested to see if gravity is some sort of vacuum that is created in aether due to a huge mass of atomic particles piled up in one place.

HERE’S MY WEBPAGE LINK. I LIKE TO REINTERPRET EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS SO WE CAN HAVE MORE USEFUL KNOWLEDGE TO GUIDE US IN PROGRESS

The Dyson paper was great in giving a good theoretical treatment and bringing attention to the idea, but the Coughlin and Harms paper points out that the first attempt at looking for gravity radiation was made (by Bloch and Weiss) 4 years before Dyson’s paper.

This week, NASA announced that it will partner with the European Space Agency to send a 4,760-pound spacecraft into space to peer out over billions of galaxies in an effort to map and measure the universe. Its purpose: to investigate the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

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